Split Sides

I Wish I'm Born A Westerner.

I wrote this as an entry for The Race Card Project, a website dedicated to understanding and learning about the roots of our inherent problems and biases when it comes to the thorny issue of race and ethnicity. It requires people to summarize their thoughts or feelings about race in just six words and to provide a background for those six words.

Here's the website for the project: https://theracecardproject.com

And here are a selection of the stories found courtesy of National Geographic: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/our-honest-hidden-thoughts-on-race-captured-in-just-6-words

My envy at Western culture and people must have started at birth, as the illegitimate child of an often-absent father and a controlling mother born in the third world. Growing up I looked with admiration at the global reach of European/American media with its virtues of liberalism and progress and opportunity, contrasted with the stubborn, inward, conservative mindset that pervades local media. I recall how the music I listened to and the TV shows and films I saw and the books I spent endless nights reading are exclusively made by people far different to my own.

But it was during my college years, when I began to have a critical view of the people and norms all around me, that my love for Western culture became increasingly pronounced, as if I was steadily absorbing and remolding myself to view the world in the Western outlook rather than the local one I was born and raised in. In those years I hungered for British music and American books and films, since they gave me endless stories of hope and change and individualism that resonated with the direction I wanted my life to take. I rejected local works because they sought to reinforce an outdated, backwards culture that wanted to drive away change in the guise of 'morality' and 'tradition'. By the time I left college and started working I have endured empty, meaningless crushes that went nowhere and had my first-ever girlfriend who ended up cheating on me. That was when I resolved to never again date the arrogant, entitled, passive local women that kept givIng me heartache after heartache. I resolved that I would live and work in the West and have a Caucasian girlfriend/partner before I hit 30.

What drove me to this choice? It's a mix of factors. Part of it was the continuous romantic rejections and the sense, both from interactions and observations, that my fullest potential can never be fulfilled in a country where people are constantly stuck to their ways, and the noblest of intentions can be twisted to serve selfish ends. But part of it was a burning desire to experience all the things I heard and read and watched in my childhood, and to know that such words and thoughts and actions done by people halfway across the world are things I can feel and know in reality. In short, I want to live the life I saw from a distance.

5 years after I left college, I still earnestly hold on to that dream, chipping away at time and working my way towards that elusive goal. Since then my conviction of personal and romantic salvation in the West has only gotten stronger, and I still cling to that beautiful dream of life and love and fulfillment out there in Europe or America, where hope and change and love and opportunity are as bountiful and aplenty as they have been for centuries past. I have long understood that my future will never be made here, so I must make it in the West where I have a chance of success and prosperity and progress. I hope this faraway goal turns into an actual experience sooner than later.